1. Choosing your Language

1. Choosing your Language
Prev	Chapter 2. Main steps of installation	Next

The first step is to choose the language in which the installation will take place.

Figure 2.1. Choosing the Default Language

Open the tree relative to the continent you live on, then choose your language. Your language choice will affect the installer, the documentation, and the system in general.

Use the list accessible through the Multi languages button to select other languages to be installed on your workstation, thereby installing the language-specific files for system documentation and applications.

	Note
About UTF-8 (unicode) support: Unicode is a character encoding intended to cover all existing languages. However full support for Linux is still under development. For that reason, Mandriva Linux's use of UTF-8 depends on your choice: If you choose a language with a strong legacy encoding (latin1 languages, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Greek, Turkish, and most iso-8859-2 languages), the legacy encoding will be used by default. Other languages use Unicode by default. If you install two or more languages, and those languages don't use the same encoding, then Unicode is used for the whole system. Finally, Unicode can also be forced for use throughout the system at a user's request by selecting the Use Unicode by default option independently of which languages have been chosen.

Note

About UTF-8 (unicode) support: Unicode is a character encoding intended to cover all existing languages. However full support for Linux is still under development. For that reason, Mandriva Linux's use of UTF-8 depends on your choice:

If you choose a language with a strong legacy encoding (latin1 languages, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Greek, Turkish, and most iso-8859-2 languages), the legacy encoding will be used by default.
Other languages use Unicode by default.
If you install two or more languages, and those languages don't use the same encoding, then Unicode is used for the whole system.
Finally, Unicode can also be forced for use throughout the system at a user's request by selecting the Use Unicode by default option independently of which languages have been chosen.

Note that you're not limited to choosing a single additional language. You may choose several, or even install them all by selecting the All languages option. Selecting support for a language means translations, fonts, spell checkers, etc. are also installed for that language. Make sure you select all languages which are likely to be useful on the machine now, because it may be difficult to configure support for languages you didn't choose at install time later on.

	Tip
	To switch between the various languages installed on your system, you can launch the localedrake command as root to change the language used by the entire system. Running the command as a regular user only changes the language settings for that particular user.